Two Stanley Spencer letters from Salonika

D. P. Waley

Abstract

THE most memorable experience which twentieth-century British painting can provide
is a visit to Stanley Spencer's masterpiece, the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere,
Hampshire. An inscription in the chapel explains that the paintings 'are the fulfilment
of a design which he conceived whilst on active service' and these scenes of Spencer's
wartime life, painted a decade after the end of the First World War, could well be used
to illustrate the phrase 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'. This is particularly true of
the Salonika panels portraying life in camp and the trenches, of 'Map reading' and the
extraordinary painting on the end wall, 'Resurrection of the Soldiers'.